YouTube Streams 14.6B Videos, 100 Videos Viewed per User

Now that YouTube has successfully dispatched Viacom's copyright infringement
lawsuit, the video-sharing Website is free to ramp its video advertising
efforts.

YouTube users watched 14.6 billion videos for the month of May, an all-time
high for the Website, accounting for 43.1 percent of all videos viewed online,
comScore said.

Overall, 183 million U.S. Internet users watched some 34 billion videos for
the month, an average of 186 videos per viewer. That's a jump from April, when U.S.
users watched 180 million videos.

When people weren't watching videos on YouTube, they were watching them on
Hulu (1.2 billion videos), Microsoft Sites (642 million videos), Vevo (430
million videos) and YouTube court buddy Viacom Digital (347 million videos).

YouTube's growth shows that its popularity hasn't waned despite a tense,
three-year legal battle with Viacom, which sued the video-sharing site for
copyright infringement.

Viacom argued Google acquired YouTube for $1.65 billion in 2006 because it
was a "haven of infringement" and profited from it via digital
advertising.

Google claimed content placed on YouTube by millions of users is protected
by the DMCA so long as it takes it down when companies request it.

Judge Louis L. Stanton, of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District
of New York, sided with the search engine, granting its motion for summary
judgment.

Stanton said that while YouTube
and Google were aware that users uploaded copyrighted material to the Website,
it was not aware which clips were added with permission and which were not.

Unwilling to concede victory, Viacom said it will try to have these issues
heard by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit as soon as possible.

Gleacher and Co analyst Ben Schachter noted that financial analysts should
view the victory as a "meaningful positive" at a time when the
company is being hounded by regulators over its Street View WiFi spying
incident and allegations of anti-competitiveness.

"The manner in which copyrighted content will be distributed, monetized
and protected online will continue to evolve, and will remain critically
important for Google, which, as a platform owner, is not primarily in the
content creation business," Schachter wrote.

This also paves the way for YouTube to ramp its video ad plans, which have
evolved over the last three years from simple in-video advertising to paid
video contracts.

YouTube had to be careful how it monetized video during the case as it
wouldn't do to make money on top of copyrighted content while a judgment was in
consideration.

The Financial Times noted YouTube limited ads to videos covered by
agreements with content owners, adding:

"Judge Stanton explicitly concludes, however, that YouTube need not
worry about placing advertisements on copyright-infringing content by mistake,
just as long as it doesn't have specific knowledge of the infringements."